Love Serve Remember

Black Serama: Post-Spiritualist Music

Rough Wood by Black Serama (on Reverb Worship Records) is the best example I’ve seen of music that comes from a deep spiritual ground, but is “post-spiritual”. It obviously draws on influences from spiritual traditions such as kirtan, chant, as well as ambient electronica, shoegaze and post-punk. But it doesn’t knock you over the head with dharma/scripture/ritual/references to specific gods or beliefs. It’s not explicitly religious at all, but radically spiritual because it elicits spirituality from sounds common to everyone’s experience, translated through a masterful use of digital processing.

Band: Black Serama; Music: ambient shoegaze; Album: Rough Wood. Critique: If there is such a genre as ‘ambient shoegaze’, this is the best example I’ve heard so far; an extraordinary album.

Bio: Black Serama are a brother and sister duo Bel and Jonny Drury from Sheffield. On the Reverb Worship label. This is their second release Style; Psychedelic / Experimental / Folk / Weirdness. Rough Wood is available for free download, namaste.

Jonny Drury is a Sufi practitioner and non-dualist who also stages the FreeNoise England Festival in Sheffield, UK.